Idiot Features: Don’t Judge Chris Brown

We’ve been doing our best to ignore Chris Brown for a while now. Admittedly, this hasn’t always been the easiest of tasks. It’s as if he has some giant appendage extending directly from his forehead that he keeps waving about in order to get our attention and occasionally prodding us with. A bit like a unicorn.

For example, just as the furore of torch-wielding villagers and vigilante mobs following the brutal attack of ex-girlfriend Rihanna had died down to the point where people presumably not on Brown’s payroll were arguing for the separation of man and music (which may have held more weight if his music wasn’t the genital wart of R&B), Brown decided to stoke the fires by forever committing the incident to his neck. Good one, Chris, you have mastered the concept of subtlety. Of course, this was allegedly meant to be a sugar skull which, if true, would lead us to tentatively suggest that perhaps the tattooist was blindly intoxicated at the time of inking, as this is the sort of monumental fuck up akin to your beefy rugby mate going in to get ‘pussy magnet’ inked on his person and coming out with ‘Dave <3’ delicately inscribed on his left buttock instead. More than anything, it feels a lot like a giant ‘fuck you’ of the O. J. Simpson and his foray into literature, If I Did It, school of thought. Of course, if we were in any doubt on this front, we could always turn to Brown’s twitter feed, where he would forego ambiguity and put it in so many words: namely ‘fuck off.’ (We’d link if he hadn’t deleted them already. Can we interest you in some trollop about being a better man? No? Okay.) And let us not forget his latest winning idea to celebrate this Halloween dressed as a terrorist. Have we said enough?

All of this we met with nothing more than a sardonically raised eyebrow, snort of derision and toast to his publicist as either a Svengali or the Clegg of PR. Oh yes, we feel we’ve been most restrained and done admirably in not passing wry comment. But it is with a sigh of resignation that we say that, lo and behold, Brown is once again flying onto our radar like some pesky gnat. It’s because we do such a good job of ignoring Brown that we’ve only recently had our attention drawn to the Don’t Judge Me video. Thus, we reluctantly break our silence and pass due comment.

Though the audacity of the title suggested we may be in for something approaching torch-wielding villager territory once again, we were instead left with an insipid ballad in which Brown mawkishly laments not wanting to go somewhere, but someone else wanting to go there, even though they should never go there, so maybe they will actually have to go there. Damn. Some insight into Brown’s psyche is provided by the lines, “Cause it could get ugly/ Before it gets beautiful,” which could arguably be said to be the same logic that went into his choice of tattoo. We will concede that R&B may not always be our jam, but we’re fairly certain that the genre has more to offer than this 50 shades of manila.

But it’s the video that really caught our attention as worthy of our derision (largely because we watched the majority of it on mute), most of which Brown spends singing, fraught with emotion, about forgiveness as he sits in front of an unconscious-looking woman splayed out on a sofa behind him. We can only assume the blood thirsty mobs battering down the door got cut in the edit. Enlightenment finally comes at the end of the video, however, when we are finally rewarded with an answer to that question we’re sure was bugging you as much as it was us: where is this mysterious ‘there’ they may or may not, wisely or unwisely be going to? The answer? (It’s so obvious you’ll kick yourself for not getting it sooner.) Of course! A Suicide mission! To outer space! To save the planet! On a rocket! Which will eventually be blown to smithereens, with only Brown on it! Duh… Nice one though, for going it alone and not simply chucking the woman on in your place.

Sorry, Chris, for breaking our silence, but you made us do it. Forgive us? Breezy!